I recently had the good fortune to visit Québec City to see the massive retrospective on Hergé (Georges Remi), the cartoonist known for creating the iconic character Tintin and crafting the twenty-three volumes of his adventures. This exhibition began in Paris in 2016, then traveled to Geneva and London. Guessing that this stop at at the Musées de la civilisation would be its only North American appearance, I jumped at the chance to see it in a location at least relatively nearby. My verdict: despite a few misgivings I had with the way the exhibit is set up, if you’re at all a fan of Hergé’s work, you should absolutely make the trip to see the show while it’s making what I’m guessing will be its only North American appearance.

(My Uber driver in Québec City had a Snowy/Milou key-chain because of course he did.)

The Hergé exhibit was at the Musées de la civilisation, which is a short walk from the Old Town/historic district. It’s hard to miss, as you can see:

The entryway to the museum was done up with the spines of various Tintin books.

The exhibit itself begins in two small anterooms that unfortunately showcase both of the things that I found a bit problematic about the way this exhibit was set up. The rooms contain, oddly, a combination of Hergé’s late-era attempts at modern art, a few other pieces of modern art (some or all are from Hergé’s collection I think), and framed thumbnails from his unfinished final Tintin book, Tintin and Alph-Art.

The larger of the two issues in evidence here is that the exhibit seems be be trying desperately to find some sort of tie-in to connect Hergé to “real art” rather than simply acknowledging that Hergé’s cartooning work is what he’s recognized and celebrated for and focusing on that right from the get-go. Among the non-Hergé works on display was a Roy Lichtenstein piece. There’s no lazier and more tired choice for a “bridge” between comics and fine art than Roy fuckin’ Lichtenstein.

The second issue is one that’s less of a concern to people well-versed in Tintin, but worth mentioning: chronology. As you can probably surmise from the fact that the exhibit opens with work from his unfinished final book, there’s no real consideration of chronology here. A page from Black Island might appear next to a page from Land of the Soviets…which in turn might abut a Destination Moon page. If you know the order of the books, you can see how his work evolves, but if you’re not familiar with the order I imagine it would be difficult to get much of a sense of how Hergé and Tintin grew and developed over time.

Now, for the good stuff: pretty much everything else about the exhibit is great–and especially: all the original art. Via some Twitter-sleuthing I got word that there were ten originals at the exhibit, which seemed a bit slight. More concerning was that the London exhibit apparently just had facsimiles of original art. Thankfully the show in Québec City had actual originals–and a heck of a lot more than ten of them!

Early Tintin works have a complex publication history. The were usually serialized first in a newspaper supplement, then reformatted into books, and then sometimes reformatted yet again for color. And at any stage of this process Hergé (or, in the case of later printings, his assistants) would redraw things, add panels, remove panels, etc. The exhibit does a great job of showing you how these changes played out in the various publications. Here, for example, is a display focusing on one sequence from The Black Island:

Check out how different the original is from the modern published version of even this one corner of a page:

Tintin is of course now wearing his standard outfit, but also his face has been redrawn, eliminating the old-style close-spaced eyes. The backgrounds have been entirely redrawn–and in the case of the second panel, a new background has been added where there was none before. Note also that Hergé has become much more confident in his use of large areas of black. The hatched “ghost outlines” on the Thompsons’ suits are mostly eliminated.

In this detail from another Black Island page you can see that Hergé’s “building” a book-format page by cutting up panels (presumably from the original art for the newspaper version of the story), gluing them to the new board, and then expanding the panels by extending the pre-existing artwork.

Hergé–and the Ligne claire style he originated–is known for an almost “dead” line, but that’s not a wholly accurate notion, especially not when you’re able to see the linework close up. Check the beautiful linework in this panel of Snowy (and note the trademark Hergé “motion squiggle” with the spider):

The room that held these originals got super-crowded later in the day. I was glad I got to the museum right when it opened so I was able to get up close and snap some high-res images of these originals. The back wall of this room was a huge display of Tintin book covers in various languages. Interestingly one language not represented was English. I kind of wondered if this was a bit of subtle shade-throwing by the museum in (French-speaking) Québec City. If so, well played!

Back to the originals, though! It was truly stunning to see pages like this up close:

They had one of my all-time Tintin pages on display–this one from Destination Moon:

Here’s something that really struck me though when seeing this page: The exhibit had virtually no mention at all of Bob de Moor. De Moor was one of Hergé’s assistants at Studios Hergé and he was in charge of drawing things like machinery, backgrounds, landscapes, etc. So in this image, for example, a pretty big chunk of it was presumably drawn not by Hergé himself but by de Moor. Yet, the only mention of de Moor I recall was something about him being dispatched to take some photo-reference images for a book at some point. This is a pretty egregious oversight–if it is indeed just an oversight.

With one odd exception (I’ll get to that next) the exhibit did a good job of explaining the process behind the production of a Tintin book. Here’s a wall-long display showing a page from thumbnails through to colored, printed book:

The one exception? I’m not sure how obvious this is to lay people, but I was really surprised there was no explanation offered within the exhibit for displays like this, which show both the penciled and inked versions of a given page:

In most comics production the inks are of course applied over the pencils. You’d wind up with just one page: the inked page with the pencils now erased from underneath. The exhibit, in fact, had an entire room showing just Hergé’s penciled pages–without any explanation for why they still exist un-inked. Maybe this isn’t something that occurs to non-comics making people? Whatever the case, the explanation is that Hergé would pencil each page, then trace it onto a fresh sheet of paper (presumably with a light box) and then that page would be inked–hence, you wind up with two pages: one of the original pencils, one of the finished inks.

Hergé would sometimes make changes between the pencils and inks. As you can see above, for example, where the final panel of the penciled page is Haddock pratfalling off the airplane gangway–a panel that’s not in the finished page. Below that panel, though, in the lower margin of the page Hergé has drawn the panel that would replace it: Haddock in the plane being attended to by a stewardess.

Another one. Notice how much of this page has been changed.

(Arrows and numbers added by me.) At (1) the bottom panel here is left at pretty much thumbnail state. I’m guessing that’s because it’s essentially a closer view of the top panel and could be achieved mainly via enlarging it and then lightboxing. (2) This panel has been completely eliminated. The panel below has been moved up into its place. In the place of that panel we get the (3) Bom! Bom! Bom! panel. The panel at (4) has also been eliminated and replaced by the one below. With the last panel on the penciled page gone as well, there’s now enough room for those two new panels–including that pretty spectacular ocean scene. There’s very little in the way of backgrounds in most of the penciled pages, presumably because de Moor or one of Hergé’s other assistants would add those.

The Pencils room also contained a big replica of Marlinspike Hall that if nothing else was kind of fun. Various characters were silhouetted in the windows. Here’s Madame Castafiore.

Interestingly the exhibit featured an entire room devoted to Hergé’s/Tintin’s ties to Asia. Several of the Tintin books take place in Asia and one of Hergé’s closest friends was the Chinese artist Zhang Chongren. In addition to some beautiful original pages from The Blue Lotus, this room also had a wall showing the translations of some of the text from The Blue Lotus. The events of the book take place around the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and Zhang, who supplied the Chinese writing for the book, used the opportunity to sneak in some anti-Japanese slogans. These didn’t go wholly unnoticed, as Japan made a formal complaint to the Belgian government after the book was published.

The final room of the exhibit was devoted to Hergé’s influences and while there were some interesting items here, it seemed more like a catch-all room for odd and ends owned by the Hergé Museum. I enjoyed seeing stuff like an original Bringing up Father page, but I’d have hands-down preferred to see more original Hergé art.

There were plenty of other things that I’ve glossed over here–a wall of beautiful Petit Vingtième covers, various video interviews with Hergé, originals of some of his non-Tintin comics work, etc. But the main attraction for me was just a chance to ruminate on the many amazing original Hergé pages on display. I visited the exhibit in the morning, left and had lunch, then returned again for really soak in the art. The exhibit runs through October. If you’re anywhere near Québec City–or if, like me, you can score a good deal on a flight–I highly recommend catching this exhibit. Id’ be delighted if it appeared at another venue in North America… but I wouldn’t bet on it!

Note: I visited a pretty great bookstore in Québec City and bought a handful of French comics there. I’ll do a separate post on that soon.

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Here’s the skinny on the 2017 HeroesCon Mega-Panel. It’s Saturday at 2:30 in room 209. Full HeroesCon programming is available on their website.

EISNER AND KIRBY AT 100

Which centenary to celebrate, Will Eisner’s or Jack Kirby’s? Ben Towle, Jennie Law, and Craig Fischer—the hosts of this year’s mega-panel—have foolishly decided to tackle both birthdays.

First is Eisner: Ben will interview Hogan’s Alley publisher Tom Heintjes, who worked closely with Will at Kitchen Sink Press during the 1980s and ‘90s, particularly on a monthly column that appeared in Kitchen Sink’s comic-book-sized Spirit reprints. Expect insights into both Eisner the artist and Eisner the man. Craig will follow by inviting two razor-sharp comics scholars, Drs. Daniel Yezbick and Andrew Kunka (himself one-half of the Comics Alternative podcast team), to collaborate with the audience on a close reading of an offbeat-yet-representative Spirit story.

Then Kirby: Jennie will guide a panel of super-fans—cartoonists Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, and Erik Larsen, and Titan Books editor Steve Saffel—through a free-wheeling discussion about King Kirby’s groundbreaking career, multiple reinventions, and lasting influence. Finally, Ben will discuss the sheer oddness of Kirby’s mid-‘70s riff on 2001: A Space Odyssey—a fitting place to end, since Eisner and Kirby were monoliths that pushed comics to higher evolutionary achievements.

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Over the past spring break, my family and I took a trip to London and then to Paris. Since it was our family vacation I mostly managed to kept my comics-centric interests in check during the trip, but I couldn’t help but make a couple of detours to check out comics-related things. So, here are a few thoughts:

London:

Our visit to London overlapped with the tail end of the Future Shock: 40 Years of 2000 AD exhibit at the Cartoon Museum. I would never have known about London’s Cartoon Museum if I’d not been specifically searching for comics exhibitions pre-London visit. And that’s too bad, because the museum itself is great and this particular exhibit was truly amazing.

The museum is, though, definitely off the beaten path. You really have to be aware of the place’s existence and be actively seeking it out in order to find it. It’s at 35 Little Russell St, Bloomsbury, London, which is a narrow street that tees into a pedestrians-only throughway, so it’s not somewhere you’d likely just happen upon.

The exhibit itself was great, though. As an American growing up in the ’80s, my exposure to 2000 AD was mostly through the Eagle Comics reprints of Judge Dredd and other 2000 AD stories. The USA-specific Brian Bolland covers of those Eagle reprints made me a fan for life of his work and it was a real treat to see some Bolland originals at the exhibit. I’ve also always been a huge fan of Carlos Ezquerra, who remains to this day my favorite Dredd artist, and there was plenty of Ezquerra on display as well.

Backing up, though… here’s what the general layout of the exhibit looked like:

In addition to the copious amounts of original art on the walls, there were a few odds and ends like this case full of 2000 AD issues:

BUT, back to that copious original art! I took a handful of pictures of the artwork before I saw a sign admonishing people not to take pictures of anything other than the general layout of exhibits. But, at that point I’d already snapped a bunch of pictures–and, hey, I figure I’m safe from Comics Museum Interpol now that I’m back in the People’s Republic of Trumpistan. So, here’re a few pics I took. First, a bunch of amazing art by Massimo Belardinelli, Gary Leach, and Dave Gibbons:

Check out this fantastic McMahon Scorched Earth spread… and to the right of it some original Carlos Ezquerra Stainless Steel Rat pages:

Second only to Ezquerra in my book is Brian Bolland, He would eventually pretty much retire from doing interior pages at all, so it was especially great to see a bunch of his Dredd pages on display here–alas, though, not the one featuring the most iconic Dredd image of all, Bolland’s “Gaze into the fist of Dredd” panel.

Seeing Bolland inking up close is pretty stunning. It’s not surprising that he’d eventually focus solely on covers, given the amount of time it must take to crank out pages like this.

It was interesting that pretty much all the artwork had balloons/lettering added on vellum, as you can see in that top close-up. The artwork beneath shows through, but I guess that’s something that wouldn’t pick up in a photostat? There were tons and tons more 2000 AD art on display–all sectioned by character–but I stopped taking pictures when I realized it wasn’t allowed.

The Cartoon Museum also has an upstairs gallery that houses what I’m assuming are pieces from its permanent collection. I visited literally just an hour or so before I had to catch the train to Paris, so I only did a quick walk-around, but here’s the general layout:

Among the pieces up there was the original cover painting for the V for Vendetta collection. You can also spot here a Miracleman cover and a Kevin O’Neill LOEG page. Bonus points for the Rupert in the stairwell!

The exhibit overall was really, really amazing and I feel really lucky to have been (completely coincidentally) in London when it was going on. Bonus: I bought some Moomin greeting cards at the museum gift shop:

One final London note. While touring the city via bus, I noted this storefront with some sort of Beano display. I have no idea what this is, but wish I’d had time to investigate.

Paris:

I was a little surprised that there wasn’t much going on in Paris as far a comics exhibitions go while we were there. Before leaving, I did though turn up this Joann Sfar show at the Dalí museum. Here’s a big ad for the same show I spotted at several Paris Metro stations:

If we’d had an extra day, I’d probably have gone to it, but from what I read in advance it didn’t seem like there would be much actual original comics art there, so I didn’t prioritize it. Before I move on to the one comics thing I did get to, I’ve got to throw out this one generally art-related anecdote:

While in Marais we decided to wander into a department store, Le BHV, just for fun. We mostly looked at clothes and toys, but out of the corner of my eye I spotted an arts and crafts section. My jaw literally dropped when I saw the art supplies they had on-hand. BHV seemed like a higher-end department store–maybe equivalent to something like Bloomingdale’s here–but the arts and crafts section (do U.S. department stores even carry art supplies?) was better than 90% of the dedicated art supply stores I’ve been into in the U.S. This is maybe a third of the section:

On to comics, though! I’d gotten some great recommendations from a Parisian friend for comics shops to visit. The one he recommended near Notre Dame, Un Regard Moderne, had odd hours and didn’t open until the afternoon, so sadly we missed it. He also, though, highly recommended Les Super Héros, which was near the Pompidou Center, which we were visiting anyway. And it is an amazing store. Here’re a few pictures that say more about the place than I could:

Exterior – with Tardi image. Pardon my thumb!

Shelves and shelves of books…

And more books…

And yet, more books…

I think this was a kids’ rack.

The back section had older volumes shelved by cartoonist.

The Christophe Blain section

More books, yo.

Moebius!

I wish I’d had had room for more books in my luggage (Delta lost our luggage at Heathrow, we bought more clothes, luggage found/returned, had to haul new & old clothes back, etc.) but sadly I bought just three books: a recent Winshluss book, a limited edition black and white edition of the new Christophe Blain Gus book, and a Toppi reissue.

Winshluss’s Pinocchio from a few years was one of my favorite books of that year (2011?). The art in Smart Monkey is quite different from that in Pinocchio, however. Most noticeably, it’s all black and white (which is unusual for French comics in general). The first three quarters or so of the story is wordless, with dialog only in the epilogue. It comes with a small minicomic which reprints a short story featuring the same monkey character which appeared in a Top Shelf collection a while back.

The Blain book is a limited black and white edition of the newest Gus book, Happy Clem, the fourth in the series. The Toppi book is Momotaro, an adventure set in medieval Japan. Boom has been publishing some English translations of Sergio Toppi books here in the U.S., but I don’t think this is one of them. I can’t read Italian at all (Toppi’s native tongue) but I can kinda muddle through French, so this is better than nothing!

The three books.

Winshluss – Smart Monkey

Interior of Smart Monkey

Another Smart Monkey iterior

Minicomic that came with Smart Monkey

Stunning drawing for the Gus cover

B&W Christophe Blain!

Gus interior panel.

Another Gus interior panel.

A week is hardly enough time to take in amazing cities like London and Paris, so I hope to return soon to one or both of them–and when I do, I’ll surely be able to spend more time exploring each city’s comics culture. Maybe I’ll even make it to Angoulême eventually…

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Years ago I decided to focus my blog writing exclusively on comics-centric subjects. With the recent death of Chuck Berry, though, I’m making an exception.

If you knew me in my pre-comics days, you know that I spent some time as a musician–and more to the point: I’ve always been passionate about music. Like everyone interested in music I’ve had fluctuating musical interests. My tastes have grown and matured over the years. When I look (or, more accurately, listen) back on things I liked when I was younger, I often cringe. There are, though, a few musicians I have loved unequivocally my whole life. One of them is Chuck Berry.

I was first introduced to Chuck Berry’s music by my mother–albeit in a sideways fashion. My mom’s a huge Beatles fan and so we had Beatles records around the house when I was growing up. My favorite songs on these records were tracks like “Rock and Roll Music,” Honey Don’t,” “Everybody’s Trying to be my Baby,” “Matchbox,” and “Roll Over Beethoven.” Only years later did I realize these weren’t Beatles tunes at all, but covers.

Digging into the sources of these recordings, I wound up purchasing The Great Twenty-Eight, a best of Chuck Berry record. It’s (as best as I can recall) the first record I bought with my own money and (for sure) one I still own and listen to today some thirty years later.

My appreciation of Chuck Berry only deepened as I delved more intensely into music in my 20s while playing in bands in the 1990s. I’m fairly certain my old band, Come on Thunderchild, played more than one Chuck Berry cover, but the only one I can specifically remember now is “Round and Round.” I got this tattoo around this time:

Chuck Berry died a few weeks ago on March 18th, and Sound Opinions–the great public radio music review/criticism show out of Chicago–did a fantastic appreciation of Chuck Berry’s life and legacy, along with a top ten list of his best songs. Their list is hard to argue with, but it’s definitely skewed toward his best-known and most recognizable tunes: Maybelline, Johnny B. Goode, You Never Can Tell, etc. I’d like to, though, post my own quick list here–as kind of an addendum to that list–of a few great Chuck Berry songs that aren’t necessarily the ones you may be most familiar with:

The Things I Used to Do

Chuck Berry didn’t do a ton of straight blues songs, but when he did–as here with his version of Guitar Slim’s “The Things I Used to Do”–the results could be pretty great. The studio version of this song appeared on his 1964 LP St. Louis to Liverpool (my personal pick for best single Chuck Berry LP) and it’s a great recording. This version, filmed for Belgian TV in 1965, is maybe even better. Check out both of the jaw-dropping guitar solos here. (Check also “The Love I Lost,” another great Chuck Berry straight blues performance.)

Oh Louisana

If you gave credence to most of the appreciations of Chuck Berry that appeared after his death, you’d get the impression he stopped writing original music in 1964. His original output post 60s was for sure pretty hit-or-miss, but there are absolutely some amazing Chuck Berry songs from the 70s if you’re willing to dig for them. By far my favorite post-60s Chuck Berry tune is this one, “Oh Louisiana,” from his 1971 record, San Francisco Dues. It’s part blues, kinda funky, and has a great vocal from Berry.

Reelin’ and Rockin’ (American Hot Wax version)

So, “Reelin’ and Rockin'” is of course one of Chuck Berry’s biggest hits and you’ve probably heard it a million times. This version, though, is from the 1978 Alan Freed biopic, American Hot Wax. In addition to featuring more explicitly lurid lyrics than the recorded version, it’s a pretty great live performance by Berry who at this point is in his early 50s.

I Love Her, I Love Her

This great track is from the hard-to-find 1968 LP From St. Louie to Frisco. It’s got a fantastic, grinding groove and big Stax-style horns. Check out those piano riffs at the end, courtesy of August “Augie” Meyers of the Sir Douglas Quintet.

Brown Eyed Handsome Man (Mercury version)

Here’s another Chuck Berry song you’ve heard a million times before… but not this particular version. Berry left Chess Records and recorded for Mercury between ’66 and ’69. One of the oddest moves during this period was the ’67 Mercury release Chuck Berry’s Golden Hits, which consisted mostly of newly-recorded versions of the original Chess hits. These recordings are contentious among Chuck Berry fans, but I think there’re some interesting nuggets here. My favorite is this re-recorded version of “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” Unlike most of the other Mercury versions which are sped up, this one’s maybe even slowed down a bit? I loses a bit of its “chugga chugga” rhythm in favor of a mellower grove. I love all the great Johnnie Johnson organ and electric piano.

Drifting Heart

“Drifting Heart” is an early Chuck Berry (1956) oddity. It was the flip side of “Roll Over Beethoven” and later was the last track on the LP After School Session. Here Berry’s squarely in ballad mode with perennial secret weapon Johnnie Johnson supplying a simple pentatonic piano figure that–along with a snakey tenor sax–gives the track a vaguely mid-eastern vibe. This is Chuck Berry at his most Nat Cole.

Fish and Chips

“Fish and Chips” appeared on the 1970 LP Back Home, Chuck Berry’s first record after he left Mercury and returned to Chess. This great little tune has an almost country-ish vibe (not surprising from the guy who wrote “Maybelline”) that’s accentuated by an accompanying harmonica part from “Boogie Bob” Baldori.

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That’s the most awkward blog post title I’ve probably ever come up with, but I don’t really know what else to call it. Scott McCloud or Neil Cohn may have some term for it, but what I’m referring to is basically this–which I encountered most recently in the Valerian and Laureline volume, Heroes of the Equinox:

What’s going on here is we’re following four different characters’ story-lines and the artist, Jean-Claude Mézières, is showing us each of their stories on an isolated horizontal tier that we follow for a while until the converge back together later in the story. (And note the great Moebius Arzach reference via the winged creature on the third row.)

The thing that stood out to me here was how much this technique is “of the medium.” Comics is often presented as a “nested system” in which each panel is read in a specific, isolated, sequential order without regard to the page as a whole. This sort of arrangement, though, makes use of the readers’ apprehension of the page as a whole. We see the parallel tracks and understand the formal conceit before reading the content of the panels themselves.

I wondered, though, how often this technique was used in comics. I had a few thoughts myself, but also got some good suggestions via twitter. Here’s a French comic, L’Espace D’un Soir, which is an entire BD that has four stories of characters in a building, each on a different tier, all happening concurrently. I really like how each story arc (I’m struggling for terminology here again) seems also to be color-coded with a unique palette.

Another instance that turned up via Twitter was this Multiple Man page by Jason Loo. As far as I can tell, this is a sample page rather than something actually published by Marvel–which is unfortunate, because it’s such a great concept. It’s not exactly an instance of parallel stories/tiers, but it’s similar in nature, combining that basic idea with a maze-like Chris Ware-esque layout you navigate via little “tabs” reminiscent of Jason Shiga’s “choose your own adventure” comic, Meanwhile.

Speaking of Chris Ware… if there’s some formal comics hijinks going on, you can be pretty sure that Chris Ware is on the case. I don’t recall any instance of him using a straight parallel stories/tiers setup, but he often cordons off individual stories layout-wise, sometimes tying them into physical relationships/locations with balloon-tail-like connectors.

The most well-known instance of the parallel stories/tiers setup is Fantastic Four #277, in which John Byrne shows us a Thing/Johnny Storm/She-Hulk story on the top row and a Reed/Sue/Dr.Strange story on the bottom. The two rows are separated not just with a traditional gutter, but also with a horizontal black line, a device that encourages you to read the top row all the way across the spread then jump back to the bottom of left-facing page to start the bottom row.

Tezuka’s epic, Pheonix, apparently uses this technique. (Phoenix has been on my to-read list forever.) Here’s a page in which we see characters in individual escape pods, each shown in distinct horizontal sequences. This is from a sequence in the third volume, but the fourth volume, Universe, is supposedly done entirely using parallel stories/tiers. (I’ll update this post if/when I get around to reading Phoenix.)

If you’re thinking that the potential side-scrolling nature of webcomics yields fertile ground for this kind of layout, you’re correct. Here’s one example of what I assume are many: Decrypting Rita by Margaret Trauth. It’s another instance where there’s a distinct color palette setting off each of the parallel stories.

An impressive use of this side-scrolling technique in a physical book is Tymothi Godeck’s 35-foot-long leporello comic, !. While it doesn’t adhere strictly to a parallel stories/tiers layout, it for sure incorporates elements of it in places throughout. Here’s my After-School Comics Club kids holding the unfolded comic aloft:

And here’s a bit of parallel stories/tiers going on:

I saved the most impressive use of parallel stories/tiers, though, for last. Rebecca Dart’s Rabbit Head is a work that shows off what this type of storytelling can do if you really dig into its formal possibilities. It’s difficult to describe how Rabbit Head works without just reading the thing, but basically it starts with a single story/tier in the center of the page. Then, elements from an individual panels “fork off” into their own tiers, above or below the previous. As the story progresses, more and more of these narrative tiers branch off, until there are seven stories/tiers going concurrently. Then, at about mid-point, exactly the reverse begins happening: elements from the outer tiers get re-incorporated into the inner tiers, until finally we’re back down to the one initial tier/character. It’s stunning.

I just started really contemplating this layout technique a few days ago when I read that Valerian story, but I’ve apparently been at least unconsciously interested in it for a while. It only occurred to me while writing this post, that I’ve used this technique myself–albeit in just one instance–in my 2008 book Midnight Sun. In this sequence I have the stranded airship crew’s narrative going on in the upper 2/3 of the page, while the lower 1/3 follows the main character as he simultaneously travels to investigate the story of the crashed airship.

Do you have other examples of comics that use the parallel stories/tiers layout (or a less awkward term for this layout)? If so, feel free to comment or email them to me!

Update (3/15/17):

In addition to the comments to this post, I’ve gotten some good feedback via twitter, so I thought it’d be good to add them here. First, some terminology stuff from Neil Cohn:

@ben_towle Nice post! The first examples are what would be “multi-tracking” or “parallel-cutting” like in film, or what I call polytaxis

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Here’s a short list of some of my favorite comics–and comics-related–things from 2016. And, as always, keep in mind my usual caveat: these are just my personal favorites; I make no claims for the best!

Children of Captain Grant – (all ages graphic novel) by Alexis Nesme, based on work by Jules Verne

I was gobsmacked when I saw a few sample pages of this posted on an Italian comics website and I bookmarked the page, thinking I might shell out for a French language version just to have to look at. Months later, I was delightfully surprised to see that it was getting an English translation, courtesy of Super Genius Comics (which seems to be a new imprint of Papercutz). The story here is a solid, straight-ahead adaptation of the Jules Verne short story of the same name. It’s a classic nautical Adventure to Foreign Lands-type story–and one that’s largely clear of the colonialist insensitivity that can make stories from this era tricky to deal with for younger audiences. The real star here, though, is the jaw-dropping painted artwork. Oh, also, did I mention that all the characters are done as animals? Hands-down my favorite comic of 2016.

There are few things I love more than seeing other cartoonists’ studios and learning about their process. There’s a fair amount of information out there about this subject as far as it relates to Western artists, but the world of Manga has remained largely shrouded to outsiders. This year, though, I became aware of Manben, a Japanese TV show hosted by master manga artist, Naoki Urasawa. The premise of the show is simple: in each episode, they record a manga artist at work and then Urasawa discusses process with them. Obviously this is all conducted in Japanese, but some kind soul has fansubbed English subtitles for the episodes to-date. You can find most of the episodes streaming on DailyMotion.

Peter Arno: The Mad, Mad World of The New Yorker’s Greatest Cartoonist – (prose biography) by Michael Maslin

I’m a huge fan of New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno, so this one’s been on my radar since I first got wind of it. It’s a much needed start-to-finish look at this important figure in the history of comics–one who’s not had a comprehensive biography to this point. One of the most interesting sections of the book appears almost as an addendum: pull quotes from currently-working New Yorker cartoonists discussing the influence and impact Arno’s had (or not had, in several cases) on them.

In terms of “eyeballs on the page,” webcomics are surely the most widely-read form of comics–and yet, like pretty much any form of comics that’s not distributed via the direct market, webcomics are rearely covered/reviewed/discussed in most comics circles. And that’s why it’s so great to see that The Beat has been covering them regularly this past year in two features: Webcomics in Review (reviews of ongoing webcomics) and Webcomics Alert (noting newly launched webcomics).

I’m a sucker for comics about cooking and this is a great one. Here’s the setup: Peony is a baker from Earth who’s abducted by aliens so she can compete in an intergalactic cooking competition. The story is tons of fun, the cartooning is loose and expressive, and the coloring is fantastic. What’s not to love? The first story arc (the “partner challenge”) is collected in a trade paperback, or you can follow along with the individual issues as the come out.

This came out way back in February, but it’s for sure one of the best GNs of 2016. It’s the first installment of what’s sure to be an epic SF story. Even at 250-ish pages, Nod Away just begins to set up the opening pieces of its Philip Dick-esque story. That the cartooning is beautiful will come as no surprise to anyone who knows Cotter’s previous series, Skyscrapers of the Midwest.

I’d been searching forever for a good handheld sharpener and I’ve finally settled on the Blackwing. My requirements were: two stage sharpening (one stage exposes the lead, the other sharpens), must fit into a standard pencil case, must have replaceable blades. The Kum model that most people recommend had all of these but also had lead pointers (that I never use), the blades seemed to wear out quickly, and it tended to break colored pencils. The Blackwing has none of these issues. I’ve been using it for about a year and have yet to need to change blades.

We Told You So: Comics as Art – (non-fiction book) by Michael Dean and Tom Spurgeon

This one’s a late entry–it came out in December and I received it for Christmas–and I’m only 200 or so pages into it, but so far it’s definitely one of my top non-fiction books of 2016. We Told You So is an oral history of the the alt/indie publisher Fantagraphics. It’s a huge slab of a book and it’s beautifully designed. There’s a lot of “inside baseball” here and things are occasionally mentioned in passing that could probably use a bit of explanation/context… but it never really impedes the overall narrative. That it’s somewhat self-congratulatory shouldn’t surprise anyone given the title of the book, but hey, it’s Fantagraphics!

As literally every single write-up of Providence will tell you, this series is a “slow burn.” Well, the burn turned into an inferno right about the time issue 10 hit the stands in 2016. It’s taken me a while to come around to the art in this series (and I still don’t think it’s well-served by the kind of coloring that’s used here) but it’s become one of my favorites, and a potential late-era Alan Moore masterpiece. If you decide to dig in, I recommend reading each issue twice: once just for the main plot, and a second time referencing the extensive panel-by-panel notations at Facts in the Case of Alan Moore’s Providence.

This is another late entry that I’m not all the way through yet… but so far this Kickstarter-funded collection of comics writing has been largely great. The ten pieces herein–by an array of folks including David Brothers, Joe McCulloch, Annie Mok, and more–address a wide range of comics (Krazy Kat to Copra) in a way that’s insightful and smart, but immensely readable. My only complaint: it’s so nicely put-together that I regret getting the digital, rather than print, edition.

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Having solidified the character designs and done a bit of last-minute story revising, I’m now beginning to do thumbnails for In the Weeds. This will be my first digitally-drawn full book (my semi-recent stories for Creepy and Cartozia Tales were drawn digitally, but were short pieces) and as such my process is somewhat different. With Oyster War, I was using a “two pass” system for thumbnailing: one pass to do page/panel layout, figure out what dialog goes in what panel, and make very basic stick figure staging/composition decisions; then, a second pass roughing in characters and basic backgrounds and laying in digital placeholder text. (Described in more detail here.) With In the Weeds, though, I’m basically doing this all in one step–giving me “thumbnails” that are somewhere in between true thumbnails and roughs. Here’s an example:

A quick aside: I’m generally agnostic about traditional vs. digital drawing, but I’m pretty firmly convinced now that if you’re not at least thumbnailing digitally, you’re making things hard on yourself. The ability to quickly and easily move, resize, and edit things at the thumbnail stage is an incredible time-saver. (Also, since I’ll be drawing digitally as well, I can now just lower the opacity of my thumb/rough layer and start penciling directly over top.)

Anyway… My plan for In the Weeds is to launch it as a webcomic–maybe with an associated Patreon–early in 2017. While Oyster War was technically a webcomic prior to becoming a printed book, in point of fact it was really always a print book format-wise–just one that was being posted online. Oyster War‘s pages were always “portrait” format, a format that doesn’t work well displayed on “landscape”-oriented monitors. I want In the Weeds, though, to be more organically a webcomic–but to be so in such a way that doesn’t preclude potential print publication in “portrait” format. The way most folks manage to do this is by setting up “pages” (for eventual printing) that are actually two landscape-format webcomic installments stacked on top of one another. A good example of this is the excellent webcomic, The Creepy Casefiles of Margo Maloo (Although, interestingly, that comic was picked up for publication and the publisher opted to preserve the landscape format in the print version).

So here, for example, is the top half of the above page as I’ll be posting it online:

Having “bleeds” as with the top panel here in a webcomic is a little odd, but I can live with it.

Urasawa & Formatting for Webcomics

But, backing up a little bit… I happened to be reading a volume of Naoki Urasawa’s manga, Pluto a while back (an incredible series; read it if you haven’t already) and noticed that most of Urasawa’s page layouts can be easily divided horizontally at the mid-point. Here, for example, is a typical Pluto page:

As you can see, it could easily be divided horizontally at the mid-point, making two landscape format “pages,” then put back together to make a for-print page. I decided–partly to give myself a leg up, and partly as a sort of formal challenge–to study Urasawa’s page layouts and use re-purpose them for In the Weeds. I began by going through Pluto and making quick sketches of as many of his horizontally-dividable page layouts as possible. Here’re a few:

Even without anything in those panels, you can already glean some interesting information about Urasawa’s Pluto layouts. One obvious thing is that never bleeds (bleeds are indicated in blue here) toward the binding (shaded in red). All of his bleeds are on the outside edges of the page. You can see in my In the Weeds page above that I’ve mimicked this; that’s a right-facing page and I’ve used top, right, and bottom bleeds–but not a left bleed, as that would bleed into the binding. I’ve rarely used bleeds at all prior to this (there are none in Oyster War, for example, and the few in Amelia Earhart are full-page bleeds, not the selective bleeding of individual panels that Urasawa–and a lot of other manga–utilizes).

You can also see that he does not avoid the supposedly ambiguous panel arrangement that comics linguist Neil Cohn refers to as “blockage.”

Note that in the Urasawa examples above, blockage layouts will be a left/right reverse of Cohn’s example since Pluto is “unflipped” manga and is therefore read read right-to-left. I highly recommend popping over to Cohn’s blog and reading his writing on blockage. In short: he doesn’t find an real evidence this type of panel arrangement creates the sort of confusion this it’s claimed to by comics-folk. My purely anecdotal experience with this type of panel arrangement is that (a) I have for sure read comics with this arrangement and read the panels in incorrect order as a result, but also (b) think that it’s pretty easy to use this panel arrangement without any such confusion if you pay attention to word balloon placement. (And for what it’s worth, manga also often uses different gutter widths to differentiate reading order–something Western comics usually don’t.)

Talking Heads

Unlike Oyster War with its nautical skirmishes, sea serpents, and fist fights, In the Weeds involves lots and lots of conversations and not a whole ton of outward-directed action. As a result, I’ve had to lay out a lot of pages of conversation–and in studying how Urasawa lays out his pages that are conversations, I stumbled on a fascinating and surprising aspect of Pluto: he almost never uses dialog from off-panel speakers. I’m taking about this kind of thing:

We “hear” a character say, “Used like so,” but that speaker is not in the panel. Presumably, it’s already been established who this person is and where they’re positioned relative to the character we do see. Off-panel dialog is also often used over a tight view of an object, as here:

Another very common use of off-panel dialog is to show the reaction of one character (shown in the panel) to dialog spoken by another character who’s off-panel, as you see here in panels one and three (well, three only kinda I guess, since we’re seeing a part of the speaker).

In all cases, off-panel dialog serves the general purpose of being able to visually juxtapose spoken dialog with something other than the speaker. This allows the cartoonist to draw our attention to an object that’s being discussed or–in conversations–show us a character’s reaction to a bit of dialog.

In Pluto, Urasawa almost never does this.

Here’s an example of a conversation in Pluto:

Note the conspicuous absence of off-panel dialog. When Urasawa wants to show a character’s reaction to a bit of dialog, he uses an entirely separate panel after the dialog panel. In fact, it’s extremely rare (I could’t find a single instance) for two different characters to speak in the same panel even if they’re both depicted in it. For example:

There are several panels here in which we see both speakers, but Urasawa never opts to have them both speak in the same panel. As a result of these choices, his conversations tend to feature long sequences of “talking heads.” He’ll even repeat images of the same speaker over multiple panels, making small changes to viewing angle or staging and varying the character’s facial expressions (facial expressions being one of the many things Urasawa is a real master at).

Urasawa doesn’t completely eschew off-panel dialog, though. I found, for example, four or five instances of it being used in Volume 2. (And do note that I’ve not exhaustively gone through every single panel of Pluto; these are just casual observations.) When he does employ off-panel dialog, though, it always seems to be either so he can have dialog over a close view of an object…

…or when we “hear” dialog being spoken by characters inside a building or other structure.

(And if you want to get nit-pickey about it, the characters are technically IN the above panel, since they’re on that structure; they’re just not seen because of scale.)

I couldn’t find any examples of him using an off-panel voice balloon in a conversation.

Why?

As a challenge to myself, I’m trying with In the Weeds to follow Urasawa’s example and not utilize off-panel dialog. My chief take-away from this practice so far is that it is indeed quite a challenge. It’s made me realize how much I’ve been relying on off-panel dialog in my other comics. For example:

You can see just in this one page how often I’m using techniques Urasawa eschews: off-panel dialog in panels five and eight (I prefer caption boxes with dialog in quotes to the more usual device of balloons with tales that go off panel) and multiple speakers in panel seven. (I’m not sticking to the multiple speakers/panel prohibition with In the Weeds, though.)

So, why the heck does Urasawa avoid off-panel dialog? Answer: I have no idea. A quick flip-through of some other manga I have shows that it’s not endemic to Japanese comics in general. The only Urasawa volumes I have in the house are Pluto, so I don’t even know if it’s Pluto-specific, or a general practice of his across all his books.

I think one reason avoiding off-panel dialog appeals to me is that it seems like its most common use is a way of shoehorning film’s practice of using “reaction shots” into comics. In fact, I did a quick image search for Golden Age superhero pages and couldn’t find any instances of these “reaction shot”-type panels. I wonder if–like a lot of comics’ other formal language–the off-panel dialog “reaction shot” panel became part of comics’ vocabulary later in the game, via film-influenced comics like Terry and the Pirates.

Whatever the case, noticing this property of Urasawa’s work in Pluto and trying to apply it to my own work in In the Weeds has proved both challenging and rewarding. We’ll see if I can hold myself to it through the whole book! Stay tuned…

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If you read this blog and/or follow me on twitter, you know one of my usual rants is about the large swath of comics that gets ignored when “comics” is–as is often the case–taken to mean “the direct market.” I’ve written before about the huge and often-ignored market for kids’/all-ages comics, but today I want to discuss one aspect of that market in particular: the Scholastic Book Fair.

What’s the Scholastic Book Fair?

If you have a school-age child you probably know about the Scholastic Book fair–and even if you don’t, you may remember the Book Fair from your own school days. If you don’t though, here’s the deal:

Scholastic is a major children’s book publisher and they partner with schools to host short-term “popup” kids’ book stores on school grounds. This is a win-win situation for everyone. Schools get to keep a percentage of the sales, Scholastic gets a guaranteed “captive audience” of customers, and parents/kids get a convenient opportunity to buy well-curated kids’ books at prices that are usually quite low.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that an event organized by Scholastic, whose imprint Graphix played a large part in pioneering the kids comics market with titles like Bone and Amulet, would prominently feature kids’ comics. But what I’m betting would surprise most comics folk is the scale of exposure and sales that these books get via the Book Fair. It really shouldn’t be a surprise, but since the Scholastic Book Fair operates entirely outside the realm of the direct market, it’s rarely discussed in most comics circles–because “comics” is so often taken to mean, “serialized monthly comic books that you buy in a comic book store,” rather than, ya know, “the medium of comics.”

Scope and Scale of the Scholastic Book Fair

So, just how big a deal sales-wise is the Scholastic Book Fair? It’s “yuge.” From Scholastic’s website:

with operations in all 50 states as well as in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Thailand, and the U.K. The undisputed leader in the field, each year Book Fairs sells more than 100 million books to 35 million children and their families visiting more than 130,000 fairs in preschool, elementary, and middle schools around the world.

As someone who makes comics, the first question that pops into my mind after taking in these (pretty stunning) numbers is, “just how many kids will be exposed to my book if it were in the Scholastic Book Fair?” I crunched a few rough numbers.

To make things easy, let’s just stick to the United States. There are approximately 115,000 Scholastic Book Fairs held at U.S. schools each year. The average middle school in the U.S. has 595 students. The average primary (elementary) school in the U.S. has 446 students. I suspect that the Book Fair skews more toward middle schools, but let’s just take an average of the two numbers to use as an estimated number of students per school: 521. Obviously every single student doesn’t go to their school’s Book Fair, so let’s just assume, say, only one quarter of the student body actually goes to the Book Fair. If one quarter of the student body (130 students) goes to each of the 115,000 fairs held per year just in the U.S., that’s 19,500,000 kids who’ve potentially been exposed to your book.

I suspect a comic could have been sitting on the shelf of every comics shop in the U.S. since the day Action Comics #1 came out and not have that many eyeballs on it.

And, just based on anecdotal evidence, I’d guess this number is way on the small size. For example, here’s one librarian on her school’s Book Fair:

@ben_towle In my small school, 100% of students come to book fair, 95% buy at least one book. I hold 2 book fairs each year.

Similarly, at my daughter’s school 100% of the students go to the Fair; each class is taken during school hours.

How Many Comics Are Actually Sold at the Book Fair?

The short answer is: Nobody knows. Along with school and library sales, sales from the Scholastic Book Fair don’t seem to be included in comics sales data one finds online. The data that usually shows up at places like ICv2 is–you guessed it–just sales to the direct market, as reported by Diamond (with BookScan folded in occasionally for more GN-centric charts).

I did though have in my bookmarks this 2014 Beat interview with IDW’s Ted Adams in which he briefly mentions the Scholastic Fair. From that interview:

The other place that I think is a great feeder system for comics but doesn’t get talked about much is the Scholastic book fairs and book clubs. We’ve had tremendous success with them over the years, most recently in the current Scholastic catalogue there are three IDW products, My Little Pony, Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One each of those books in the current catalogue. I just got the sell through on those and it’s also extraordinary, it’s through the roof.

While he declines to cite actual sales numbers, he does say this:

…virtually 100% sell through in significant six figure quantities for all three of those books.

It’s worth noting what Adams says about BookScan numbers–that they don’t accurately reflect the sales of books through the Book Fair.

How Does a Book Get Into The Book Fair?

There’s not a ton of information out there about this, but I did have this one short blog post by a Scholastic representative bookmarked. There’s a week-long “boot camp” held where publishers present books to a committee which is tasked with deciding what books get into the fair. This reminded me a lot of the process of selecting Eisner Award nominees (I was a judge one year) and, like the Eisners, the committee is deliberately made up of people with specific backgrounds:

…former teachers, media specialists, booksellers, authors, and veteran Book Fair organizers – along with representatives from our Book Clubs and International divisions…

Also like the Eisner judging process, it seems pretty grueling:

Collectively, they’ll spend more than 10,000 hours reviewing more than 4,000 books this year from publishers across the globe to find the books that will turn kids into lifelong readers.

Comics at this Year’s Book Fair

So, why am I writing about the Scholastic Book Fair all of a sudden? Because I went to the Fair at my daughter’s school yesterday… and I took special note of what role comics currently play in the Fair. Comics are relatively new to the Book Fair, but thanks to the growing critical, academic, and educational acceptance of comics (and of course kids’ readership!), they’re there in force now.

Kids receive a catalog in advance of the Fair and this year’s catalog prominently featured (not surprisingly) Raina Telgemeier’s Ghosts–certainly the most anticipated kids’ GN of the year–on the front cover.

How about the Fair itself? Here’s what I saw comics-wise…

So here’s a half-table that was all comics. This is the first year that Scholastic supplied “Graphic Novels” signage. You can see that this display skews heavily–but not entirely–toward licensed books: Powerpuff Girls, Grumpy Cat, etc. I was generally surprised that there wasn’t more manga, but you can see a few here. I suspect stand-alone stories are selected pretty much exclusively for the Fair, which excludes most manga, since the majority of it is multi-volume.

I was surprised at first to find only a single stack of Ghosts in a middle shelf. Roller Girl, by the way, is an incredibly popular GN that I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned once anywhere in the comics press. I’ve read my daughter’s copy and (despite having really weird lettering/word balloons) it’s a wonderful story. If you get a copy for your kid, be prepared to immediately invest in some roller skates!

Here’s the other big comics display. This ran prominently along the top of several shelves, again with the new “Graphic Novels” signage. It featured some manga, including Yona of the Dawn, that are exceptions to the stand-alone rule (although they only had one volume of each). Night School seems like an interesting choice: OEM horror. Zelda, Dr. Who, and Halo are licensed properties. Marvel’s Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel were the only superhero books there, but direct market folks likely know Lumberjanes as well. Sunny Side Up (by the folks who do Babymouse) is also incredibly popular with kids, so no surprise there.

Here’s something interesting: I’d not heard of Trouble Makers, so I looked it up. It’s apparently a “Scholastic Book Fair Exclusive.” I didn’t know that was a thing. The book sounds interesting, though.

At the checkout, the Ghosts mystery was solved. It’s apparently so popular that they just kept a stack of them right at the cash register. They were down to two when I was paying for our books.

Also: not comics per se, but it was nice to see Kate Beaton’s Princess and the Pony for sale:

The Bottom Line

Well, we don’t actually know what the “bottom line” is, but my suspicion is that this is pretty much you if you get your comic into the Scholastic Book Fair:

We may never see any hard numbers on comics sales at the Scholastic Book Fair, but I think it’s pretty clear that the Fair is a major sales/reading vector for comics that we should probably be paying more attention to.

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So, this 90’s Rob Liefeld page was making the rounds recently on Reddit’s /r/comicbooks message board:

Taking digs at Rob Liefeld’s art is one of comics fandom’s favorite pastimes (which is as lazy as it is unfair–but that’s a subject for a different post, perhaps) and this page is a favorite because The Enchantress in panel eight really shows off Liefeld’s (in)famous female anatomy quirks. Looking at this page anew, though, the thing that really stood out to me was panel three, in which The Enchantress’s butt apparently speaks:

Mis-pointed voice balloon tails are fairly common in comics but this one’s particularly notable (and hilarious) since it’s pointing to a butt cheek instead of the speaker’s head. As I started thinking about this particular bit of lettering, it occurred to me that this whole page is lettered in a way that’s very different than the way I’d have lettered it were it one of my own pages.

I don’t know who lettered this page and I’d never presume to “correct” a professional letterer, but I thought just for fun that I’d go through and re-letter this page and talk a bit about what changes I’d make and why. Just to reiterate: this isn’t necessarily a better way to letter this (well, except maybe for the butt thing), just a different way.

So, here’s the result:

So what’d I do?

Panels 1, 2, 4, 5 – In all these panels I’ve done the same thing: I’ve moved the balloons to the top of the panel. To do this, I’ve moved the figures lower in panels one and two. In panel three I’ve shrunk the figures slightly to create more room up top and I consequently had to add a bit of the Enchantress’s shoulder up top. I’m guessing you’d get in trouble if you did this to someone else’s work you were lettering, but I do it with my own work as needed.

So, why’d I do this? As a general rule, I think all lettering should be at the top of the panel–especially with small panels–unless you have some really compelling reason for it not to be. Partially this is to keep the balloons as unobtrusive as possible. Let’s face it: voice balloons are an awkward device. Try to draw as little attention to them as possible. And for sure, avoid putting them over figures as if you can.

In spite of what you may read, comics are not a nested system; a reader will read a balloon and then read the next nearest balloon even if they haven’t already read all the ones in the current panel.

Basically: what really controls how people move through a page isn’t the left-to-right/top-to-bottom way panels are arranged, but how the word balloons are positioned. I chatted a bit about this “rule” with comics linguist Neil Cohn on Twitter and he seemed to confirm that his studies pretty much back this rule up as fact.

So, what I was trying to eliminate with these changes are the places where balloons from an upper tier are more adjacent to the balloons on the tier below than to the balloons in the next panel:

I should probably have shoved the second balloons in panels one and two up a little closer to the first balloons… but, you get the idea:

Panel 3 – Given the way this panel is staged, there’s really no getting around the fact that you’ve got to put a balloon over a giant butt, but I at least changed the balloon tail a bit so that it’s pointing upward to where her head presumably is:

Panels 6 and 7 – The main thing I had to deal with in these two panels is the dreaded Manga Eye Panel™. (Blaming stuff on manga is another popular pastime for comics folk, by the way!) A tightly-cropped panel of an eye (or both eyes) is a pretty common occurrence in manga and it’s gradually seeped into the vocabulary of western cartoonists. Wisely, though, when you see it in Japanese comics it’s usually a silent panel, often employed as a “beat” within a fight scene. Here, though, we have to deal with placing speech over the eye, which is tricky.

There’s really no good way to place a balloon into panel seven and not have it look like the eye is speaking. It’s not a great solution, but what I opted to do is this:

I’ve added an ellipsis to the end of the dialog in panel six and to the beginning of panel seven and then enclosed panel seven’s dialog in quotation marks–indicating that the dialog in panel seven’s caption box is a continuation of the dialog begun in panel six. This is similar to a “voice-over” in film. It’s still a bit odd in that this kind of lettering device is usually used when the dialog in the caption box is not coming from the character in the same panel. (Or, if it is, it’s the character at some earlier time. This is a common way to transition to a flashback scene: present tense caption box narration over panels of past events.)

Panel 8 – This was a pretty minor tweak, but again: I just wanted to get that voice balloon as far away from panel three’s voice balloon as I could. I shrunk The Enchantress just slightly to accommodate this.

Well, that’s it!

One thing to note here: What Liefeld is trying to pull off with this page is pretty difficult. He’s having to set up an eight-panel conversation between two characters, one of whom is never seen until the final, eighth panel. (This setup makes things pretty challenging for the letterer, too. They’ve got to place seven panels of balloons for a character that’s not actually in each of those panels.) And he’s done a pretty effective job of it I think. He’s got different panel compositions throughout via the device of gradually getting closer and closer to Loki in panels 1-7. Also: the way Loki’s staged in panels 1-3 really accentuates the character’s movement: going from prone to kneeling/looking up.

I’m betting page length constraints prohibited him from doing what seems to be the obvious layout trick here, though: having this as a right-facing page and moving The Enchantress/panel eight to the following page so that the reveal occurs at “the flip.”

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As I mentioned in my last In the Weeds progress post, one of my post-Oyster War take-aways was that I need to spend more time working on character designs before I sit down and start drawing pages. To that end, I’ve spent some time over the last few weeks focusing on the badger character (I really need to give all the characters names!). I won’t give every single character this kind of time and focus pre-drawing, but since he’s the main character I thought he merited some extra attention design-wise.

I started out trying to get used to drawing his body in typical stage poses. I figured that if I could nail a few of these, everyday actions/poses would be pretty easy. Here’s one of the more successful ones:

…and the photo ref I based it on. That’s Mike Watt, one of my favorite musicians of all time.

One thing I noticed when practicing full body poses was my tendency to revert back to more human-like body proportions, rather than the more animal-ish proportions of the original design. You can see that going on pretty clearly in the bottom drawing here, where I’ve inadvertently shortened his torso and lengthened his legs, making his body much more human-like:

This character was originally going to be the guitar player, but I decided just for purely visual reasons that the rhino character should play the smaller of the two instruments–so, this guy became the bass player. He’s playing a ’75 Gibson Ripper, by the way. I have handy photo ref of that particular model in the form of my bass from back in the Dark Ages of the 1990s when I was in a band:

Another thing I noticed when doing some of those full body drawings was that I was having a particularly difficult time drawing his head. I like the way it looked in the initial design, but I was struggling to draw it from different angles. This isn’t an uncommon problem; you can get a good looking drawing from one angle but be at a total loss to draw it from some other angle. The reason for this is usually a lack of understanding of construction—that is: the basic shapes that make up the form you’re trying to draw. Here’s a page of me struggling with getting his head to look right:

I continued for a while to try working out a good construction in my sketchbook, but wasn’t making much progress. Eventually, I decided to pull out the big guns and make a quick maquette of the badger’s head. I’m a bit wary of maquette-making for a few reasons, but I do feel like they can be really useful in situations like this because in making the maquette you’re forcing yourself to settle on a construction and learn it. I made a point not to spend a ton of time on it, but here’s the result:

As an aside: I was struggling with a similar problem with the rhino character a while back and tried building a model of his head with Silo, a 3-D modeling tool. I eventually gave up because I felt like I couldn’t justify the time I’d have to commit to learning the software vs. working on paper or with Sculpey. Some day, though, I’ll revisit some 3-D software. It’d be a great tool to know how to use.

Making the maquette seems to have really helped me out, as I had a much better grasp of basic construction after that. My final exercise with the badger was do do a round of facial expressions. I’d usually not do practice facial expressions to this degree of finish, but I’m still figuring out how I want to ink/tone these characters, so I figured it’d be good practice:

These aren’t perfect, but I’m definitely starting to learn my way around his facial features and basic head construction.

Now, onward to to some of the other characters (but maybe not in such depth)!